Many types of valuable consumer products are produced surreptitiously by counterfeit producers and inserted at some point into the legitimate supply chain. The alcoholic beverage industry is especially plagued by counterfeit producers. The legitimate suppliers of the packaging for these products have been unable to produce, at reasonable cost, packaging which cannot be reproduced by the counterfeiters. Consequently, counterfeit goods are virtually indistinguishable from the legitimate goods without directly examining the contents of such goods, which requires actually opening the packaging of such goods. In the case of most goods, and especially beverages and other foodstuffs, opening the packaging renders the goods worthless since they can not be resold.
Another problem associated with the sale of the alcoholic beverages is insuring that the tax or duty has been paid each bottle sold. It has been estimated that many millions of dollars of governmental revenues are lost each year because required taxes are not paid. One solution currently under discussion in the United Kingdom is to have stamps, in the form of strips of paper, placed over the top of the bottle's package to show that the tax has been paid for that package.
It is anticipated that radio frequency identification (“RFID”) devices (commonly called “RFID tags”) will soon replace bar codes as the chief way to identify goods. An RFID tag is pre-encoded to include information about the associated product to which it is attached or to contain a distinctive identification code. When an RFID tag is interrogated by an external reader, it will provide a radio signal containing that pre-encoded data. Thus, for example, a code can be encoded within the RFID tag that defines the product during checkout and this information can be read (instead of a bar code) to determine the type of goods and calculate its price (which is either also encoded in the RFID tag or stored in a main database and obtained based upon the product code). However, a great deal of concern has arisen recently relative to privacy issues because conventional RFID tags continue to be active long after a product has been purchased. This means that third parties can continue to read the information in the RFID tag for the life of the product, for example, allowing these third parties to generate information about a person's shopping tendencies without their knowledge.
As a result, although RFID tags can be used to distinguish between legitimate goods and counterfeit goods because the counterfeit goods will not include valid RFID tags because of the difficulty in reproducing RFID tags, the use of such RFID tags on goods is likely to raise privacy concerns if the RFID tag remains active for the life of the product.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an RFID tag for an alcoholic beverage package which can be programmed to verify that any applicable tax or duty for that package has been paid.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved apparatus and method for verifying the authenticity of the contents of a container which can not be easily duplicated by counterfeiters and which is permanently disabled upon the opening of the container for the first time.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an improved apparatus and method for verifying the authenticity of the contents of a container which can also be permanently disabled electronically.